There hadn't been a game in three years.  The dugout was in severe disrepair, the wood rotting in places from water damage and bugs.  The benches were stuck all over with old chewing gum, and graffiti was carved, scrawled, or painted over every flat surface.  Lizzie and Lu 4ever etched into the east wall with a crude heart shaped around it.  Cassie is a SLUT! marked out in faded blue pen against the grain of a low bench. LAZARO SUX sprayed in fresh, vivid red paint across the sagging ceiling.  It was surely every little hooligan's ideal hangout.

Chainey felt out of place, leaning there against the side of the dugout and peering in.  He wasn't really cut out for rabble-rousing, despite the amount of trouble he'd managed to stir up in the past few weeks.  No, Davey was the real mischief-maker, and it was because of Davey that he was standing in an abandoned baseball field in the middle of the night.  

"You totally owe me," Davey had said.  "Don't be a dick."

Chainey sighed.  Honestly, he didn't get why Davey couldn't just come here himself.  Why did it have to be such a huge secret that he was--

The inky sky above the field burst into bright white light, and Chainey nearly fell over backwards.  Someone had flipped on the field lights.  He quickly ducked beneath the dugout's overhanging roof and tried very hard to pull his gray hood down over his face.  He knew his heart would be pounding violently if it could still beat, because he was worse than dead if he was seen again.  He didn't quite know what Lazaro was capable of, and he wanted things to stay that way.  He picked his way to the back corner of the dugout and hunkered down in the shadows, kicking a couple of empty beer cans out of his path and hoping the sound of aluminum on aluminum wasn't as loud out on the field as it was in his own head.

A small figure was making its way across the field.  Chainey thought it seemed to be coming from over by the announcer's box, and it was headed straight for his hiding place.  

"Fuck," he hissed, and pressed himself against the wall, edging back toward the mouth of the dugout.  Can't be seen, he thought in a panic.  Can't be seen, can't be seen, can't be--

"Hey?"

Shit.  Whoever it was, they were talking to him.  But, he reasoned, they probably thought he was just some punk kid.  This was going to be fine, no big deal!  Just hightail it right out of the field and back into the dark.

He cleared the edge of the wall.  He could run.  He could make it.

"Chainey?"

He stopped.  They were much closer now, and with his eyes adjusting to the bright lights, he could make out a familiar striped beanie pulled down over long brown hair.  A slight figure, short and slim and ridiculously non-threatening, and Chainey felt like an idiot.

"Jesus, Parker," he said, and slumped against the edge of the dugout.  "Those lights--that scared the crap out of me.  Was that you?"

The boy--and he was a boy, surely no older than fifteen--looked a little embarrassed, pressing his lips together and training his eyes on his sneakers as they crushed the overgrown grass that had taken over the baseball diamond.

"Sorry," he said.  "Yeah.  Just--"  Chainey could have sworn the kid was blushing.  "Well, it was really dark.  I didn't wanna talk in the dark."

"Oh.  Well."  

The crickets chirped noisily in the tall grass, and the lights buzzed against the dark sky, beginning to draw in mosquitoes and moths from less spectacular sources of illumination.  Summer noises, Chainey thought, though he couldn't remember ever having been to a ball game or watching nighttime bugs kamikaze themselves into electric lights.

The ball field really did look quite sad without night's dark shadows to flatter it.  The pitcher's mound had grown over entirely to become an ugly green lump out in front of home plate, or at least where home plate ought to have been.  Chainey thought, just maybe, he could make out the paths that once ran from base to base, places where the grass looked a little less wild and springy.  It had probably been a very nice place to play ball, but now it was a wonder that those blinding white lights still worked.  He looked up toward them, raising a hand to shield his eyes.  Some of the bulbs were out.

"How'd you do that, anyway?"

"Huh?"  Parker slipped into the dugout and sat down on gum-free patch of bench.  "You mean the lights?"

"Yeah.  Don't they keep that kinda stuff locked up or anything?"

The boy shrugged his small shoulders and ran his fingers over the wood.  The end is NIGH was carved a few inches away.  "They used to, I guess, but kids have been breaking in to the box over there for years.  They keep a lot of stuff in there.  I mean, they did.  I think most of it's been stolen by now."

Chainey turned around the edge of the dugout and came in beneath the caving roof to sit.  He chose another bench, giving the kid his space.  Though Parker assured him otherwise, he was still convinced the boy was frightened of him, at least a little.  He couldn't really blame him.  Chainey knew well enough that people like Sam were the exception.

"I came out here a couple times with my brother and his friends," Parker went on.  "He didn't want me there.  I was still in middle school.  But I said I'd tell mom if he didn't let me go."  He was looking down into his lap, and Chainey could see the resemblance.  Same brown hair, same nose, the same shape to their mouths.  Parker's eyes were hazel.  Davey's were gray and dead.  Just like his own.

"They broke into the box and messed with all the lights and the scoreboard and stuff.  Dragged out the little cart one time--you know, the thing you roll over the field and it lays down the chalk dust?--and they drew a giant penis in the outfield."

Parker was smiling then, and he looked up at Chainey.  "The school was real mad.  Called the cops and everything, and everybody knew it was them, but they couldn't prove it.  Mom grounded Davey anyhow."

Chainey felt as though he should have been surprised, but after spending so much time around Davey, he just wasn't.  He wouldn't have put it past Davey to do the same thing to the grounds of the Institute if he could only find a chalk cart.  But he found himself smiling back and thinking, not for the first time, that it should be Davey sitting here with his brother, not Chainey.  To see him now, risen from the dead, would surely be a shock, but wouldn't it be worth it to his family to have him back again?  Davey had people that still cared about him, that missed him.

Chainey was tempted, as he always was when he spoke with Parker, to tell him everything.  About the Institute, about Davey walking and talking and working under Lazaro, about being recruited to do the same.  All Parker knew about him was that he'd woken up in a dump and went around town with the illustrious Maggot Boy.

Instead, he said, "Sounds like your brother was kind of an idiot."

"Yeah," said Parker, grinning, "he kind of was."